How come I don't have autism? And neither do any of my children, all of whom had the MMR initial vaccination AND the booster, among myriad other vaccines during their infancy and early childhood. HMMM???

My son does have autism, and when he heard this crap on the news, back when the Wakefield thing was in the news, he got kind of upset about it.

I posted on Facebook that I had recently gotten this vaccine, and had a couple of childhood friends tell me I shouldn't put that "stuff" in my body. I guess it's better to become paralyzed with polio, struck down by smallpox, die from pneumonia, or infect pregnant women with rubella and let their children become deformed and die than to put "stuff" into my body to acquire immunity to a myriad of diseases, right??

The vaccine issue - or the herd immunity issue - is a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons. Successful vaccination programs mean that the risk from the disease you are vaccinating against can actually drop lower than the risk from the vaccine. When that happens, it is in an individual's interest NOT to get the vaccine, as long as most other people do. But if everybody acts in their own narrow self-interest, then the vaccination rate drops, and the risk from the disease starts to exceed the risk of the vaccine.

This is why vaccination becomes a moral issue as well as a health issue. And is, presumably, why anti-vaxxers feel "pressured" to vaccinate. They ARE being "pressured" - because if they don't vaccinate, their children ARE potentially better off than the children who are vaccinated - until their lobbying becomes sufficiently successful that outbreaks start to occur. Then, tragically, not only are their children MORE at risk than other children, but so are children who CANNOT be vaccinated, and indeed children who WERE vaccinated are also at elevated risk.

The ideal situation of course is eradication. But that is only possible where there isn't an animal reservoir, and there often is.

They are pressured - primarily - because Big Pharma wants to make sales. The ideal situation is not eradication, but rather improving our bodies to be sufficiently resistant to disease.

How come I don't have autism? And neither do any of my children, all of whom had the MMR initial vaccination AND the booster, among myriad other vaccines during their infancy and early childhood. HMMM???

My son does have autism, and when he heard this crap on the news, back when the Wakefield thing was in the news, he got kind of upset about it.

I posted on Facebook that I had recently gotten this vaccine, and had a couple of childhood friends tell me I shouldn't put that "stuff" in my body. I guess it's better to become paralyzed with polio, struck down by smallpox, die from pneumonia, or infect pregnant women with rubella and let their children become deformed and die than to put "stuff" into my body to acquire immunity to a myriad of diseases, right??

The vaccine issue - or the herd immunity issue - is a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons. Successful vaccination programs mean that the risk from the disease you are vaccinating against can actually drop lower than the risk from the vaccine. When that happens, it is in an individual's interest NOT to get the vaccine, as long as most other people do. But if everybody acts in their own narrow self-interest, then the vaccination rate drops, and the risk from the disease starts to exceed the risk of the vaccine.

This is why vaccination becomes a moral issue as well as a health issue. And is, presumably, why anti-vaxxers feel "pressured" to vaccinate. They ARE being "pressured" - because if they don't vaccinate, their children ARE potentially better off than the children who are vaccinated - until their lobbying becomes sufficiently successful that outbreaks start to occur. Then, tragically, not only are their children MORE at risk than other children, but so are children who CANNOT be vaccinated, and indeed children who WERE vaccinated are also at elevated risk.

The ideal situation of course is eradication. But that is only possible where there isn't an animal reservoir, and there often is.

They are pressured - primarily - because Big Pharma wants to make sales.

No. That is not the reason. If anything, Big Pharma would make more money from letting people get sick. The pressure, as I said, but you didn't seem to read the post, is because a vaccine doesn't offer an obvious benefit to a healthy child.

How come I don't have autism? And neither do any of my children, all of whom had the MMR initial vaccination AND the booster, among myriad other vaccines during their infancy and early childhood. HMMM???

My son does have autism, and when he heard this crap on the news, back when the Wakefield thing was in the news, he got kind of upset about it.

I posted on Facebook that I had recently gotten this vaccine, and had a couple of childhood friends tell me I shouldn't put that "stuff" in my body. I guess it's better to become paralyzed with polio, struck down by smallpox, die from pneumonia, or infect pregnant women with rubella and let their children become deformed and die than to put "stuff" into my body to acquire immunity to a myriad of diseases, right??

The vaccine issue - or the herd immunity issue - is a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons. Successful vaccination programs mean that the risk from the disease you are vaccinating against can actually drop lower than the risk from the vaccine. When that happens, it is in an individual's interest NOT to get the vaccine, as long as most other people do. But if everybody acts in their own narrow self-interest, then the vaccination rate drops, and the risk from the disease starts to exceed the risk of the vaccine.

This is why vaccination becomes a moral issue as well as a health issue. And is, presumably, why anti-vaxxers feel "pressured" to vaccinate. They ARE being "pressured" - because if they don't vaccinate, their children ARE potentially better off than the children who are vaccinated - until their lobbying becomes sufficiently successful that outbreaks start to occur. Then, tragically, not only are their children MORE at risk than other children, but so are children who CANNOT be vaccinated, and indeed children who WERE vaccinated are also at elevated risk.

The ideal situation of course is eradication. But that is only possible where there isn't an animal reservoir, and there often is.

They are pressured - primarily - because Big Pharma wants to make sales. The ideal situation is not eradication, but rather improving our bodies to be sufficiently resistant to disease.

It even shows the costs of epidemics of the diseases that vaccines prevent, and shows how much more profit there is for Big Pharma in treating people in those epidemics.

It also lays out the reasons why profit margins tend to be lower for vaccines than for other pharmaceuticals.

Sometimes you have to wonder about the thought processes of all those conspiracy theorists. They'll tell you that Big Pharma press people to get vaccines to make a profit of all those people they vaccinate (and keep from getting sick). And then (often in the same conversation), they'll tell you that Big Pharma totally has the cure for AIDS (or even cancer), but they don't reveal it, because they want to make a profit out of treating all the sick people (that they want to keep sick).

Thoughts, dave?

Who even made the rule that we cannot group ducks and fish together for the simple reason that they are both aquatic? If I want to group them that way and it serves my purpose then I can jolly well do it however I want to and it is still a nested hierarchy and you can't tell me that it's not.

Go back to your Trump cheerleading thread, dave. That's all you're good for.

Who even made the rule that we cannot group ducks and fish together for the simple reason that they are both aquatic? If I want to group them that way and it serves my purpose then I can jolly well do it however I want to and it is still a nested hierarchy and you can't tell me that it's not.

That comic was great! I wondered what would happen when thimerosal was removed from vaccines. I assumed that the anti vax crowd would thin out, but the poor dumb little lambs saw the autism numbers went UP, and seamlessly pivoted. Are they trying to ban tuna?

Prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday that he expects the Trump administration to move forward with a vaccine safety commission and that President Trump pledged that he was "not going to back down" if the drug industry objected to the commission.

Kennedy said he had spoken with presidential aides three times since his January meeting with Trump. His understanding is that a commission is still being developed, he said. ...

He said that if the commission moved forward, he would want members without existing prejudices on the issue.

i.e. medical scientists familiar with the facts need not apply.

"I understand Donald Trump better than many people because I really am a lot like him." - Dave Hawkins